Sangupushpam

This beautiful creeper is called Butterfly pea plant in English and you can easily find this plant everywhere in . You will find this plant in many Indian homes as it is used in poojas and prayers. It also grows wildly and needs little maintenance, the butterfly pea plant in the above picture was growing wildly in our farm. We call it Sangu Poo | Sangu Pushpam in Tamil and is very popularly called Aparjitha in Hindi and Bunga Telang in Malay. In Malaysia, Thailand and Burma, the flowers are used to color the rice while cooking and there 2 varieties of this plant, one produces white and the other produces violet flowers. It's botanical name is Clitoria Ternatea and it is widely used Ayurvedic medicine. This beautiful creeper has wonderful medicinal uses and especially it's use in enhancing the memory and reducing stress in very popular. Scientific studies have been done extensively on this amazing plant and many of it's traditional uses have been proven. The root extract acts as a mild sedative and calms down the central nervous system so it can be used as an anti depressant and anti stress medicine. Many confuse clitoria ternatea with shankhpushpi even I did at first but the true shankhpushpi is Convolvulus Pluricaulis. All the three remedies that are given below have been scientifically proven. The root extract of clitoria ternatea when given to 7 day old rat pups for 30 days showed improved retention capacity and learning ability than the other group of rats that were not given the extract. The root extract also show anti asthmatic activity. The flower extract of the plant also has been proven scientifically to protect against free radicals and is full of antioxidants. Actually butterfly pea tea is quite famous and has a beautiful blue color. If you don't have fresh flowers for making the tea, you can easily order organic dried flowers through shops like amazon. And other very surprising effect of this amazing plant is the chloroform and methanol seed extract has been proven to have larvicidal activity against 3 species of mosquitoes! The wound healing property of butterfly pea also has been proven through research. Side effects: Clitoria Ternatea has blood sugar lowering properties so diabetic patients should be cautious when using this herb. Toxicity: This herb has been proven as a safe herb and there was no any major side effects or mortality even at doses of up to 3000 mg per kg of body weight when tested on rats for a period of 4 days.